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Ask HN: How would you restart your software engineering career if you could?

by AliveShine on 7/7/23, 2:34 PM with 4 comments

If you had the time/resources/money (whatever) to reboot your journey in tech, how would you go about it?

Is there anything that you think that if you do this time, you would be better than what you are right now?

I'll start a. I would tinker more. I am horrible at it. b. I would probably start as a sys admin. I think sys admins or devops or infrastructure or platform engineering or whatever it is, is really interesting and has high impact in any organisation.

  • by jkmcf on 7/7/23, 11:43 PM

    I'd have acted on my (relatively low-effort) ideas that turned out to be profitable when others actually did follow through.

    I do wish things had conspired so that I was a little later in the evolution of web development rather than the very beginning -- there's a big difference between 1992 and 1998.

  • by skepticATX on 7/7/23, 3:18 PM

    I became a dev in (at least how I saw it) the age of breadth being more valuable than depth.

    Now it seems that we are shifting to depth being (much) more valuable than breadth. So, I think I’d focus on becoming an expert in something instead of being a generalist.

  • by jmkr on 7/7/23, 3:39 PM

    With time, resources, and money, I'd get a masters. If money allowed me to live better than a ph.d student life, I'd strongly consider it.

  • by readonthegoapp on 7/7/23, 5:17 PM

    Start my own business earlier.